Sid Caesar’s Finest Sketch

The gaunt old man wearing pajamas in his bed bore little resemblance to the young and swarthy man on the screen. When Sid Caesar watched himself on “Your Show of Shows” with me that afternoon, he gazed across a span of fifty-five years. By then, he could barely speak. But, when he saw something funny, he could laugh, and did. Even off a fuzzy kinescope, Sid Caesar was still very, very funny.

Especially on the Saturday night in April of 1954 when he, and Carl Reiner, and Howard Morris, and the band of writers behind them took off after the popular program “This Is Your Life.” It was something new: television spoofing television. Even mocking movies, as the program also did, was sufficiently novel that when, a few months earlier, Caesar and company had gone after “From Here to Eternity,” an unamused Columbia Pictures had sued NBC.

Though the competition is stiff, many feel that this sketch, called “This Is Your Story,” is the funniest that “Your Show of Shows” ever did. But for all the honors heaped on the program, both when it first aired and ever since (because it was never syndicated, it is more often praised than actually watched), one superlative is overlooked. That night nearly sixty years ago, the show produced what is probably the longest and loudest burst of laughter—genuine laughter, neither piped in nor prompted—in the history of television.

It began barely a minute into the sketch, when Reiner—doing a brilliant imitation of Ralph Edwards, the oleaginous host of “This Is Your Life”—plucks an unsuspecting Sid Caesar from the audience to profile. It builds as a recalcitrant Caesar is dragged to the stage. And it lasts for most of the remaining nine minutes, during which Caesar’s character, one Al Duncey, has his life pass before him, and Caesar places his own extraordinary talents on display.

There’s his inventiveness, his sheer comedic instincts. “Your Show of Shows” was tightly scripted; improvisation, or at least long bouts of it, was relatively rare. But because this segment starred the audience as well, the beginning of “This Is Your Story” was not rehearsed. When Caesar, who wants no part of the usual treacly, sentimental journey, tries fending off Reiner, and then a phalanx of ushers, with his overcoat, then attempts to flee the theatre, he is acting on his own.

There’s his versatility. Here he plays a schlub from Darling Falls, Montana. (With its largely urban audience—television had yet to reach the sticks—“Your Show of Shows” could poke fun at rural America.) But Caesar could just as credibly play a German general, a corporate chieftain, an Italian peasant, or Stanley Kowalski. In this single segment, he moves from wise-guy confidence to stupefaction to indignation to bewilderment to mushiness and, finally, to lasciviousness, when he’s reunited with a slinky, gorgeous blonde. (An embarrassed Reiner tries to break them up mid-clinch: it turns out she was a complete stranger, meant to appear on the following week’s show.)

There’s his efficiency. Caesar talked an awful lot on “Your Show of Shows,” and not just in his spurious foreign languages. There were all those long monologues he gave, standing alone on stage. But he was arguably more eloquent saying nothing. He needed only to widen his eyes, or twitch his lower lip, or furrow his brow, as he does here. And there was his hard work, and his humanity. You could see his every drop of sweat, and hear his omnipresent cough. Caesar cleared his throat more than anyone in the history of television.

“This Is Your Story” appeared in the home stretch of “Your Show of Shows.” The program’s ratings were down—newly installed on CBS, Jackie Gleason was threatening NBC’s Saturday-night hegemony—and its costs, including Caesar’s own salary, had gone through the roof. Filmed sitcoms were cheaper, and more manageable, than live variety shows. Barely a month earlier, NBC had announced that, come June, the show would go off the air. Thus the audience in the Center Theatre that night, three thousand strong, knew that they were watching something to cherish.

In a last, desperate attempt to survive, the program’s producer, Max Liebman, had shuffled the lineup and imported new writing talent, with Neil Simon, Danny Simon (his brother), Joe Stein, and Tony Webster supplementing Mel Tolkin, Lucille Kallen, and Mel Brooks. The doomed show was actually at its peak; many of its most famous sketches, including the impersonation of a clock, appeared that last season.

But in this sketch it is the acting, as much as the writing, that’s key. It highlights two more of Caesar’s gifts: his discernment and his generosity. Never afraid to have talented people around him, Caesar is actually upstaged here by his second second banana (that is, after Reiner): Howard Morris, who plays Duncey’s long-lost Uncle Goopy, who, overcome with emotion, repeatedly clings to and slobbers over his favorite nephew. Shamelessly milking the moment, Morris throws in all sorts of extra embraces, even clinging to his leg as a lumbering Caesar drags him to the couch. It was a dangerous thing to do, but evidently Morris felt he could do it.

Even had I caught Caesar years earlier, I might not have learned much more from him. He was very difficult to interview: like many comics, only much more so, he was notoriously shy. He had never been terribly articulate, and all of the hard knocks he’d taken, or inflicted on himself, had exacted a toll. This late Caesar was soft-spoken, tentative, wounded. It hadn’t helped that he’d grown so emaciated; robust comics lose weight at their own peril.

In a way, I was to learn more about this famous sketch from John Cleese, of Monty Python. He’d been among a group for which I once played “This Is Your Story,” which, for all his knowledge of comedy, he had never seen before. I glanced at him as it was underway, and he was doubled over with laughter. When it was over, he, unlike Sid Caesar on that afternoon back in Beverly Hills, said something significant. He thanked me.

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